Spc Jodie Wood

Deb: To any parent who has a young man, a young woman who?s going to Basic Training, I would say to them: Make sure you do send those letters. Get a system down.

Jodie: I mean, I got letters every day from someone in my family, and it just meant so much to know that I had that backing behind me.

Deb: We ended up with a system where every weekend we would address all the letters and try to write something in each one of them, so every day we could put something in the mail.

Deb: At one point, she had called or written and said, 'they think I need my own post office.? And then the next time she said, 'they think I need my own zip code,' because so many different people were writing to her.

Jodie: They started calling me Zip Code.

Deb: It's really important, and even though we couldn't speak with her and we weren't getting any response back, it was very important for her that we kept sending letters.